Interviewing the writer Joseph Pearce for one of the Herald’s recent Merely Catholic podcasts has opened up a whole new world for me. I found myself being convinced that William Shakespeare was indeed a dedicated, faithful Catholic, and it’s changed the way I see his work.
I know what this looks like at first sight, the over-enthusiastic semi-discriminate grabbing whatever we can to bolster the faith. But it isn’t that. There is no honour or dignity in simple-minded partisanship.
There was instead the sheer excitement of discovery upon discovery; brick by brick, an edifice of beauty was built, and the discovered key to the door proved to be a perfect fit.
Is there proof Shakespeare was a Catholic? No, but then there wouldn’t be. The context in which he lived and wrote was not neutral. It was viciously partisan. Swithun Wells, the elderly Catholic tutor of the Earl of Southampton, was summarily hanged outside his London house because Mass had been said there in his absence. It was a very dangerous thing to be a Catholic. A man who was as clever as he was devout would deprive the state of the evidence to hang him.
But in all matters of balancing the evidence, there comes a point when, at the same time as any likelihood is compellingly strong, the contrary arguments prove to be unconvincingly weak.
There are three aspects to the exposure of Shakespeare’s devotion to the Catholic faith.
The first is the inferences from what we know about his life, which is paradoxical, since we know so little about William Shakespeare. And rather oddly, that becomes one of the strongest inferences in itself. It’s the same irrefutable clue that Sherlock Holmes adduces in “Silver Blaze” when he has to work out why the silence constitutes proof; the fact that the dog didn’t bark in the night suggests there is only one solution to the crime.
The second is what happens when we lay a Catholic template on the plays; how do they look? Are they amplified or diminished in meaning and significance?
And the third – perhaps most delightfully for the crossword addict or puzzle-solver – are the secret codes embedded in the texts that only Catholics can solve.
Why is it significant that we know so little of his life? Because the 16th century was a vicious police state, riddled with spies. The success of the Protestant Erastian experiment depended on the crushing of English-native Catholicism. The only way a Catholic could avoid bankruptcy, torture and execution was to remain invisible. Shakespeare was supremely and so competently invisible. He neither goes to Anglican services as the law required, nor is he noticed and fined. The fine for non-attendance was the equivalent of an annual salary.
His father and mother are faithful Catholics, so is Susanna his daughter. His patrons are faithful Catholics. At the end of his life, his only purchase of London property was the Blackfriars Gatehouse, a building well understood to be a refuge for the discreet Catholic community attending illegal Mass. Go figure, as our American cousins say.
The second and third aspects run together: the breaking of the secret codes. In her 2005 book Shadowplay, Clare Asquith charts the narratives that were woven beneath the presenting drama, noting that each of the major later plays has a coded religious message.
This column can only contain one exploration, so I turned first to The Taming of the Shrew. I had always thought it an unusually clunky play that treated the power relations between the sexes with an oddly provocative and unsatisfactory lack of subtlety. There is a kind of Punch-and-Judy swagger to it. And that is peculiar because Shakespeare has a very careful and deft touch with gender relations.
Asquith decodes the Shrew and argues convincingly that while at the overt level it’s about men and women, its real message is about the struggle between Catholicism and the reformers. All through the plays, “tall and fair” signifies Catholic and “small and dark” Protestant. The “dark and shrewish Katherine, ‘brown in hue as a hazel nut’”.
Kate represents the unruly, ruthless, chaotic new Protestant religion, throwing its capricious weight around. Just in case it wasn’t clear, she even echoes the abusive language of the Puritans in decrying music. When Kate smashes a lute over her tutor’s head, she gives vent to the Puritan slang of the day and upbraids him as a “twangling jack”.
Should you have missed Lutheran credentials at the wedding, it is announced (echoing Luther’s catchphrase) “here she stands”. When Petruchio commands Kate to call the sun the moon, it was a reminder to the almanack-conscious audience that the Puritan Archbishop of Canterbury had repudiated the pope’s Gregorian calendar. As Voltaire later observed, “The English mob preferred their calendar to disagree with the sun than to agree with the pope.”
Who comes to the rescue to tame her? Petruchio. Peter. Peter was not a neutral name, or concept. The knock-about pantomime that is a clumsy exposition of the gender war is in fact an assault on the Puritan primacy over the old religion.
As with the most effective of religious and political dissidents, the skill was to inflict maximum damage on the credibility of the regime and not be caught.
Shakespeare was master of this covert task as much as with his overt verse and drama. What he longed for and fought for was a restitution of the true faith without which England would come to nothing.
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